Batman: Arkham City

After a rocky launch last month, Rocksteady finally got their DirectX 11 problems sorted out for Batman: Arkham City earlier this month. Batman: Arkham City is loosely based on Unreal Engine 3, while the DirectX 11 functionality was apparently developed in-house. With the addition of these features Batman is far more a GPU demanding game than its predecessor was, particularly with tessellation cranked up to high.

At Extreme settings Batman is quite daunting for our entire GPU lineup at 2560. Nothing except the GTX 590 can crack 60fps, though the 7970 begins to come close at 52fps. Relative to NVIDIA’s lineup Batman ends up being one of the weaker games for the 7970, with the 7970 only taking an 18% lead over the GTX 580 at 2560. As for the 6970, the 7970 has another very strong showing opposite AMD’s previous generation, beating the 6970 by 44%.

At 1920 we’re still using Extreme settings and the story is much the same, though the 7970’s lead drops a bit more. Against the GTX 580 it’s now only 14% faster, and against the 6970 it’s 35% faster. Things do eventually pick up at 1680 when we back off to Very High settings and stop using MSAA, at which point the 7970 takes a surprising 32% lead over the GTX 580 while the lead over the 6970 jumps back up to 47%.

Looking at all of our cards it’s really the 5870 that tells the whole story. Tessellation plays a large factor in Batman’s performance, and as a result the partially tessellation-constrained 5870 absolutely struggles even at 1920. Consequently this is further proof that AMD was able to get a great deal of additional performance out of their geometry engines even with the 2 tringle/clock limit.

One request when diving into acronyms (from the “quick refresher”), first one is followed by (definition in parenthesis) or hyperlink. Your site does the best on the web at delving into and explaining the technical evolution of computing. You maybe even able to tech the trolls and shills a thing or to they can regurgitate at there post X-mas break circle jerk. Never underestimate the importance or reach of your work.Reply

Will the new video decode engine either add software accelerated gpu or fixed function hardware WebM/VP8 video decode? ARM SoC's basically already has those capabilities with rock-chip including hw-decoding, TI OMAP IVA3 DSP-video processor supporting VP8/WebM, Broadcom supporting it in their video processor and others to come. Would be odd to be able to do smooth troublefree 1080p WebM on a phone or tablet, but not a desktop and laptop computer without taxing the cpu and buses like crazy. It's already there hardware-wise in popular devices to do if they add software/driver support for it.

You list the HD 6870 as 240 on the first page ("AMD GPU Specification Comparison" chart) but then list it as around 160 in the "Winter 2011 GPU Pricing Comparison" chart. 80 dollars is quite a difference. Reply